Knowledge as ecology

Reflecting on many years working, thinking and writing on KM, the strongest meme for me remains knowledge ecology. Looking at knowledge as an ecology evokes powerful images, similarities and useful connections. Let's explore:

Knowledge evolves.

Today's knowledge may not be useful, applicable or recognised tomorrow. This is why it is so difficult to reconstruct past civilizations - we can find artifacts, restore buildings, speculate on social norms but we cannot retrace, thought forms, social norms, unwritten categories. Knowledge is 'local', social and always morphing. We build on yesterdays experience and explore to discover tomorrows 'truths'.

Relationships matter.

You cannot appreciate, picture, evaluate or quantify knowledge without understanding how things are connected, without a feel for the paths along which knowledge flows, without a 'picture' of trust, reciprocity, social capital and people to people relationships. Stocks alone do not tell the story, with data on patents or other IP you cannot determine the potential for future innovation, predict the impact of retirements or the disruption of a merger.

Emergence & self-organisation.

Knowledge emerges through conversation, it is hard to codify, capture and store unless there is a community that resurfaces, refines and creates distinctions, giving meaning, testing and weeding beliefs and thoughts. There is an autopoietic  relationship between knower and the environment, each influencing the other.

Think.
Sustainability, adaptation, food and energy webs & chains, stasis, climax, niche, fitness,

Nardi & Day examine information ecologies in terms of co-evolution, keystone species, diversity and system flows. They convey many of the key tenets of knowledge ecology. John Seely Brown also addresses this subject noting the importance of sense-making and community.

Check this collection of resources on knowledge ecology for further reading, and my previous post on this topic.

 

 

Comments

[Dave44000]

Knowledge is not just local. It is not just two people sitting in a room talking about their explicated knowledge and building agreed, but hardly useful definitions that ignore the participants knowledge.

"Yeah, if you buy lunch, I'll agree that x means y, so we can get on with it." That's executive sponsored, empathetic, consensus building today. It is not dialogue. Dialogue can only build agreements at the level of commonality by ignoring details. If you build a spec on the basis of these agreements, you end up with requirements volitility. The assumption that gets hid is that developers can't respect everyone's details. They can. And, today, they can do that economically.

So what, we aren't talking about building applications. But, here it is, we are operating with burried assertions. Here that produciton efficency is more important than operational efficency. Once some sees these constraints and surfaces them, they have to be sold, they have to be corrected. The real value is in seeing the constraint. That is where a business can leverage their asymetical realization and make bucks. Sharing such realizations doesn't make much sense to the business. Yes, knowledge must be free. But, only after the public buys it. Like in the stock market, once the public knows, the value is gone.

Explication is the behavior, it is the benefit. The explication of knowledge is what KM should be about.

As far as it being local. No. You can buy implicit knowledge and do so every time you buy something that you couldn't build yourself. So when you buy a drill, you bring the drill maker's knowledge into your business. It is implicit. It will remain implicit. It doesn't need to be explicated, but you get value from that knowledge. This is another area where knowledge needs to be managed. But, in the uproar about local, social, data, info, content, we never get any closer to the true value of KM.